The present invention relates generally to text-to-speech synthesis and document processing. More particularly, the invention relates to an e-mail reader that may be operated using a telephone and which includes the capability to create and edit reply messages without the use of a keyboard.
E-mail and voicemail are rapidly becoming the communication means of choice for business people. Both of these modes of communication offer the important advantage of "time shifting" a communication so the originator and recipient do not need to be in direct communication at the same time. Time shifting provides the office worker with the convenience of ignoring incessant telephone interruptions without losing important business contacts. Time shifting also enables global companies to conduct business operations throughout the world, with virtual disregard of local time zones.
Whereas voicemail and e-mail provide similar time shifting benefits, for the most part, e-mail has heretofore been relegated to the computer. Unlike voicemail that can easily be accessed from a public telephone when traveling, e-mail suffers in that a computer, modem and Internet hookup are typically required. Although many business travelers carry laptop computers capable of accessing their e-mail account, using these takes time and quite a bit of trial and error to get working. Presently e-mail access is impractical in many situations, such as when using public telephones at the airport.
Some have developed text-to-speech systems that will do a reasonably good job of reading e-mail messages, and with some prior planning, these systems can be used to access one's e-mail account from a public telephone. However, present day text-to-speech e-mail reader systems do little more than replay all messages stored in the user's e-mail post office box. The user can hear the contents of an e-mail message, played via the text-to-speech synthesizer, but there is essentially no opportunity to compose and send a reply message by e-mail with these systems.
Without an easy to use and fairly robust mechanism to replay to e-mail messages, the full advantages of time shifted communication are not achieved.
The present invention overcomes this significant problem with present day e-mail reader systems. The invention uses a text-to-speech engine to play a user's e-mail messages, accessed from the user's post office box. The present invention will also allow the user to compose reply messages through a multi-modal dialog system that is well-adapted to a variety of different devices including the public telephone. Specifically, the invention permits a user to enter, edit, address and send complete e-mail messages using the touch tone keypad or optionally voice via voice recognition or digital audio sound files. The invention includes an ASCII encoder system that allows an e-mail message to be composed and addressed using the full ASCII character set, entered through a special technique using the touch tone phone's numeric keypad. Thus the invention allows a user to enter any valid e-mail address, even though the address includes one or more ASCII punctuation characters not found on the touch tone keypad.
To facilitate message editing, the invention includes a message editor that defines a virtual "cursor" to aid in moving forward and backward through the text message and to aid in making insertions and deletions. The virtual cursor is moved forward and backward in increments of variable granularity. In the message editing mode a one-word granularity is used by default. This allows the user to quickly move backward and forward in the message being composed, one word at a time. This one-word-at-a-time granularity is designed to facilitate use of precomposed message templates. The user can select an appropriate message template and then simply fill in the blanks.
The same virtual cursor is used in e-mail playback mode. Desirably, the granularity in playback mode can be different than that used in editing mode. The preferred system defaults to a one-message-at-a-time granularity, allowing the user to quickly advance forward and backward through an entire set of retrieved messages. The user can readily change granularity, as desired. Thus once a particular message is identified using a message granularity, the user can switch to a word granularity to more quickly play or replay a particular part of an individual message.
At times the user may wish to include voiced comments with an e-mail reply. The invention provides this facility through a user-invoked command that will append a digital audio sound file to an e-mail text message as an attachment. After entering the proper code to signify an attachment, the user then simply speaks into the telephone and the spoken message is digitally recorded and attached to the e-mail message.